Say I’d like to set up quarterly billing for my community, so that all users are charged on Jan 1, Apr 1, July 1, Oct 1 at like 3 am. I have this set up so when users sign up it triggers a recurring API workflow to charge their CC’s via Stripe on the aforementioned dates.

My question is is there a limit to the number of scheduled workflows that can be processed at one time? If for instance my app had thousands of users, and it’s trying to process thousands of charges on those quarterly dates, will it cut me off at a particular point? Basically, is it safe to set it up this way? Or is there a better way.

@marktuff Your app can handle workflows on thousands of User things as long as the app has enough server capacity which you can upgrade. There are plan-based limits on number of recurring events per thing, this ranges upto 20 recurring events per thing.

Hi @neerja, thanks for the response. I’m currently under a professional plan, so it looks like I can have up to 5 recurring events.

Is there somewhere that defines how many scheduled workflows per recurring event can be processed at one time, especially as it relates to my current plan? I have not deployed my app to LIVE yet, so usage is low (just testing), hence not needing extra capacity right now, but I want to be confident that the way I have these billing dates scheduled will be able to be handled in the future. From what I gather you are saying yes they can, into the thousands. Is there a ballpark number (10,000, 20,000?) of workflows that you would say can be safely executed before needing to look at extra capacity? Or does this vary wildly and we just need to intently watch our usage logs?

One of my fears is, if there is an error in processing the scheduled workflow charges and they don’t all occur (does that ever happen?), is there a way to manually reschedule the err’ed workflows that might have been missed during an error? How does this work?

Why not just do this with Stripe subscriptions? There’s no reason to dedicate capacity in your app to do this. (And you won’t do a better job of it than Stripe. Unless billing is the core competency of your app, this is one of those – “offload to another service” things.)

Hi Keith, I thought to do that but I couldn’t figure out how to do custom date billing if for instance I wanted to have all user subscriptions be billed on the same date each quarter (e.g. Jan 1, Apr 1, July 1, Oct 1). It sounds like there is a way to do it, but from what I’m seeing you can only start a subscription from the date the user is added to one, which starts the clock for whatever frequency you want. So if someone joined today, how do I make the next billing period Apr 1, as opposed to May 11 (3 months from today).

The billed amounts are metered too, so I would need to send that information to Stripe anyway sometime prior to the subscription charge so it can charge the proper amount.

All this combined seemed a little overwhelming to me, hence sticking to what I knew in programming this on bubble’s side, but I agree that I like your suggestion of using Stripe if I can figure out how to do it and would appreciate any guidance in being shown how to accomplish that.